


A Hell's Kitchen Boy

by BrownieFox



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hell's Kitchen isn't a nice place, Human Trafficking Mention, I think about foggy a lot, blood mention, death mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 13:00:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19273849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrownieFox/pseuds/BrownieFox
Summary: Foggy grew up in Hell's Kitchen, and it shows.An vague and drabbly introspection.





	A Hell's Kitchen Boy

_ “When I was a kid, I used to make up stories to the sirens.” _

_ ‘Yeah,’  _ Foggy thinks,  _ ‘We all did.’ _

Back in elementary school, nearly every student in the playground would stop what they were doing when screaming police cars and ambulances and fire engines could be heard, sometimes even seen from the schoolyard. They’d all crowd around chain-link fences, small hands clawed into the diamond spaces and all bobbing up and down, trying to look around each other’s heads to see the vehicles, which were the peak of cool for nine year olds. Whispers went up about what the reason for the sirens could be. An apartment burned down? A shooting? Mutants running amuck? Drug deal gone wrong? Human trafficking that got caught? 

(God, they were just  _ kids  _ and already knew about all those things. Foggy, as an adult, could hardly imagine what the ‘game’ must be like now that aliens and gods and magic were completely viable explanations.)

Sometimes, he’d catch one of the kids being oddly and uncharacteristically quiet, standing away from the group. Or sometimes they’d stay right up against the fence even after everyone else had gone back to playing on the monkey bars and picking around a soccer ball, gaze lingering in the direction of whatever new small catastrophe had struck the city. A lot of those kids dropped out of highschool, rumors filling the gaping hole that they left behind that the next time you saw them, they were the reason for the sirens.

It felt like there should be some sort of prize if someone could correctly guess what made the police speed through the city streets, but with all the crime in Hell’s Kitchen there was no way to know for sure. Thus, the game never truly ended, never had a ‘winner’, just was played over and over, day after day, never a silent twenty-four hours to speak of.

 

oOo

 

The Nelsons were a big family. Many had often made the teasing comment that Foggy was related to half of New York. It was a gift he didn’t understand for a while.

He’d always understood the power of saying ‘my mom wanted me to a butcher’ could have. 

 

oOo

 

In high school, it wasn’t too rare for people to go missing. 

It was more likely to be girls, but boys disappearing wasn’t unheard of. They’d vanish without any trace, into the dark alleys of Hell’s Kitchen, swallowed up by the shadows. There was a familiar rhythm, carried through the generations of Hell’s Kitchen natives, of how to deal with that.

The second day, make sure the person had been reported missing.

By the fourth day, check that somebody had asked their family how they were holding up.

Unless the person was particularly popular or forgettable, the rumors were wildest and most common on the fifth consecutive absence.

Day seven, rumors stopped and a flower was usually delivered to the family as the student body went on with their lives.

Molly Wells had been cute and pudgy and laughed at Foggy’s jokes. They’d had gym together, as well as American history and sewing. When their football team won their first game of the year, she kissed him on the lips and then gave a surprised shriek, turning red as a tomato and running out of the stands, leaving Foggy with the taste of fake cherries on his lips as he tried to process what had just happened.

Foggy was the one who made sure Molly was reported missing, as well as the one to check on her family. He didn’t need to leave a flower on her parent’s doorstep. He saved it to put on her grave instead, crying like an idiot and apologizing to Molly’s older brother, now an only child. Her brother admitted that he was glad she was dead instead of one of those girls locked in a shipping container that were sold off like meat.

 

oOo

 

Foggy owned and could shoot a gun.

He didn’t really look like the person who could claim either of those things, but in Hell’s Kitchen it was a borderline necessity.  Food, clothes, rent, bullets. His parents had sat him down and shown him how to clean a handgun. There were three in various places around the house and Foggy was told each location and what to do if he thought he was in danger. Occasional weekends found them at a shooting range until he could hit about bull’s eye accurately enough to be rewarded with ice-cream right after and his own gun on his birthday.

At the recommendation of a cousin who’d nearly been kidnapped on a date, he brought a knife to every single one. He never really thought he’d have a reason to pull it out, but it made his cousin feel better - and maybe calmed some of his nerves too. The same cousin also taught him how best to hold a knife and where best to try stabbing. The latter was something he already knew, but a refresher never hurt anybody.

 

oOo

 

“Franklin… Nelson?”

“Most people call me Foggy.”

“You aren’t related to Trent Nelson, are you?”

“We’re a big family. Honestly? Maybe. It’s hard to keep track.”

“... you’re meal’s on the house, Mr. Nelson.”

“Whoa, wait, no-”

“We insist.”

 

oOo

 

Playing ‘Captain America’ was no less than a tradition, handed down from generation to generation of elementary kids dating all the way back to people’s great-grandparents. Kids running around the field, divided into HYDRA and the Howling Commandos. It was usually just an elaborate game of tag with fancy labels slapped on it, but sometimes plotlines - which inevitably got insanely convoluted - would be played out. Dumb reasons would be thrown out to give reasons to drag everybody into a baseball or soccer or capture the flag game.

Foggy once got stuck on the HYDRA team, not a total liability since he was pretty good at baseball - hitting, pitching,  _ and  _ throwing - but he was still in the latter half of people chosen on teams. He half-heartedly ran around the playground as one of the ‘good guys’ chased after him, feeling obligated to stay in the game until something more interesting happened. He managed to climb up a slide, but another Howling Commando kid was waiting for him, leaving him trapped on both sides.

“You’re coming with us, HYDRA scum!” Johnny, the kid who had been lying in wait, said with a surprising amount of smugness for a third grader.

And then pulled a gun out of his jacket.

Foggy was quiet for a moment, heart stopping in his chest. Then he screamed. As did the kid who had chased him up the slide. Soon enough, half the playground was screaming as more kids noticed the gun. Johnny went from smug to nervous, and then when a worried teacher came over and shouted at him to drop the gun he did just that and started sobbing hysterically. He was frogmarched to the office, the teacher keeping an iron grip on his shoulder and the discarded gun. Eventually the game resumed for all but Foggy.

Foggy, who after having screamed until his lungs gave out had sunk down, sitting at the top of the slide, heart still beating frantically as the imagine of the kid holding the gun straight at him refused to leave his mind.

It wouldn’t be the last time he was held at gunpoint, but it was certainly the first.

 

oOo

 

It took Foggy way too long to realize why he liked Marci.

Well, there was the obvious fact that she was an absolute babe, but really there were plenty of those to be found around campus. Of course, they always found their way to Matt it seemed, and every so often Foggy was able to pick up Matt’s leftovers, but for the most part they were more interested in the novelty that was blind Matt Murdock and his charming smiles and how good he’d be in bed.

Marci definitely earned points for not being interested in Matt. It was nice that, for once, Foggy wasn’t approached by a hot girl just to be asked about Matt. Marci was sugar-sweet smiles that hid shark teeth and a ruthlessness that would definitely be terrifying to go up against in court. She came right out and told Foggy she wanted a one night stand. Somehow, it didn’t stop there. Somewhere along the way, it became a relationship.

And it was as he watched her verbally dismantle a creep at a bar that he realized he’d seen her before.

He’d seen that hard-as-nails was exterior, those sharp eyes that always checked for exits, that mastery of the thing you know you could do well so you made it into your weapon. He recognized her hands, how they strayed near her purse when she felt trouble coming. She was high-maintenance but he’d seen her stab those high-heel shoes into the foot of a girl harassing some guy, disguising it as just walking by. Foggy was familiar with the way she’s once looked at a cut on her hand and just sighed, shaking her head and muttering about blood on her clothes.

Of course Foggy found the girl that was cut of Hell’s Kitchen cloth.

 

oOo

 

Hell’s Kitchen tended to take people.

Foggy’s dad had lost a brother to the streets. There one day, gone the next, never heard from again. His dad didn’t like to talk about it, but if he was drunk he’d sometimes reminisce about the brother that he no longer had, that he would never know exactly what had happened to.

Foggy’s mom lost a sister. Foggy had been old enough to know her, to remember the phone call that left his mom sobbing. His aunt had been found in her apartment, three bullets in the chest and rooms ransacked. He was sure that there were people in his family that knew what that was about, but they never told him and he decided that maybe there were some things that were better left unknown.

Foggy almost loses Theo, his mom, and his dad all in one move and it shakes him to his core. But being friends with Matt had made him tougher, stronger, and he doesn’t stop his plans even with them on the line.

 

oOo

 

While at college, somebody grabbed a slightly drunk Foggy as he was walking back to his dorm. 

There were a few confused and terrifying moments where Foggy was manhandled and pushed up against a hard brick wall. This wasn’t Hell’s Kitchen and he had let his guard down and now he was paying for it. But he’d been prepared for something like this to happen since he was six years old and he fumbled for his pocket, pulling out the knife from his cousin that he still brought everywhere and anywhere he could.

The knife flicked out and he slashed the man across the chest. It was definitely a sloppy and shallow cut, not even tearing through the man’s shirt in some spots, but the surprise gained Foggy time to push the man off and run, run without stopping, without hardly breathing, all the way to his dorm. 

Matt was there, sitting straight up on his bed and head turned to the door.

“Are you okay?” He said, sounding almost desperate for an answer.

“Yeah,” Foggy panted, and then amended that statement with an “I think I was almost kidnapped.”

Matt’s mouth twisted but for whatever reason he didn’t ask any more questions, and that was fine with Foggy. 

Later that night, Foggy opened the knife back up and saw a bit of dark red on the blade. He felt sick and… something else he didn’t want to put a name to, that the knife after all these years had finally been used to cut another person. 

 

oOo

 

There are a lot of ways that Foggy and Brett were different.

There were many ways that they were very alike.

Brett worked hard to keep Hell’s Kitchen safe. He worked hard shifts, trying to keep the crime of their neighborhood under contorl. Maybe a pointless effort, something that would never come to pass and would just leave him burned out years from now and bitter at the world. 

Foggy worked hard to help the people of Hell’s Kitchen find justice. Maybe a pointless effort. There always seemed to be more guilty than innocent, more cases that left Foggy wanting to throw up at the pictures he had to parse through or fuming at the injustice of it all. Maybe years from now would find him jaded and uncaring for the city, for all that happened to it.

They were both willing to risk it to do what they could now, while they still had the heart to.

 

oOo

 

Karen was new to New York, new to Hell’s Kitchen. 

Foggy though she was good looking with a nice smile and a good small laugh and he was glad that Matt had convinced him to take her case. Foggy didn’t expect her to last more than a month before finding a better neighborhood.

But Karen stuck around. She bought office supplies for their small workplace and carried mace in her purse. He once had her look for something in his bag and had watched her out of the corner of his eye as she pulled the handgun out of there and held it in hands that didn’t shake, that found a good and correct grip on it for a fraction of a moment before she put it back and found the papers he had wanted.

When Nelson and Murdock ceased to exist, she took pick and shovel and dug herself a spot in Hell’s Kitchen.

It was like she was always meant to be here.

 

oOo

 

Moving wasn’t an option.

The sirens had long since become a lullaby.

Minor bruises and cuts found on people were shrugged off with minor explanations.

One had to always assume that everybody was armed to some extent or other. 

The habits that Foggy had been raised in would be useless somewhere else, perfectly crafted to fit this place, this home.

He was a Hell’s Kitchen boy, born and raised, and he always knew he was going to die here, but damn it he loved this neighborhood and he was going to _live_ until he had no reason left to.


End file.
